MVA Master degree

The MVA master program started in ENS Cachan after the visionary initiative of Robert Azencott in 1996to develop mathematical modeling approaches to understand, emulate and predict the mechanisms of perception.

The program mainly attracts 50-70 students (per year) from engineering, mathematics, computer science, and physics, driven by concrete mathematics and computing. It offers a wide and coherent list of courses (31 in the last edition) where solid conceptual and theoretical corpus in mathematics and computer science are presented and coupled with high level applications to computer vision, brain sciences, image and signal processing, statistical learning and complex data processing.

From the viewpoint of techniques, the range of subthemes is diverse and includes harmonic analysis, wavelet analysis and signal processing, variational methods and PDEs in image processing and neurosciences, optimization, deformation theory and riemannian geometry applied to shape space in medical imaging, information theory and pattern recognition, statistical learning and high dimensional statistics, compressed sensing, bayesian networks, ...

More than 250 internship proposals per year are presented to the students from both institutional organizations (CEA, INRIA, INSERM, Universities) and industry including large groups (Aérospatiale, Alcatel, Saint-Gobain, Sagem, General Electric, Matra, Philips, Siemens, Xerox etc...) but also mid-size companies, and startups from France and USA mainly. A significant proportion of students (of the order of 70%) starts a PhD program right after their MVA year.